From California to Virginia, Texas to Michigan, local municipalities are coping with the drastic new regs in one of the few ways still available:

"We feel bad as a city administration and as a council in having to cut hours from 35 to 29," Medina [OH] Mayor Dennis Hanwell said. "We have the budget to pay the people, but we do not have the budget to pay for the health care." If they hadn't made that cut, the city faced up to $1 million in new health costs courtesy of ObamaCare."

For a city like Medina (just shy of 27,000 souls), that's a pretty hefty chunk of change. And when you start multiplying that by all the small towns across the fruited plain, you're talking serious coin. With U6 unemployment in the double digits, it's difficult for smaller cities to keep hitting their citizens with more and more taxes to cover public sector health insurance costs. Shrinking tax bases and increased insurance costs make for a powerful (and dangerous) combination, as we're seeing now.

From California to Virginia, Texas to Michigan, local municipalities are coping with the drastic new regs in one of the few ways still available:

"We feel bad as a city administration and as a council in having to cut hours from 35 to 29," Medina [OH] Mayor Dennis Hanwell said. "We have the budget to pay the people, but we do not have the budget to pay for the health care." If they hadn't made that cut, the city faced up to $1 million in new health costs courtesy of ObamaCare."

For a city like Medina (just shy of 27,000 souls), that's a pretty hefty chunk of change. And when you start multiplying that by all the small towns across the fruited plain, you're talking serious coin. With U6 unemployment in the double digits, it's difficult for smaller cities to keep hitting their citizens with more and more taxes to cover public sector health insurance costs. Shrinking tax bases and increased insurance costs make for a powerful (and dangerous) combination, as we're seeing now.